Tuesday Nights in 1980 (5 page)

“What are you doing, James?” Marge said with a nervous laugh.

James wavered. He felt drunk on his happiness and the tequila, dizzy from both, and his vision was a hive of swarming red. Suddenly he couldn't imagine what he would say; his heart cinched and stopped.

“James?”

“Marge!” he managed.

“Jammmeess . . .” she said.

“I have something I want to ask you!” he practically yelled. His knee was getting wet from the damp concrete. He might throw up.

“Yes?” she said.

“I was wondering if you'd . . .” Back-of-throat dryness. Back-of-head dizziness.
Be normal. Ask her to marry you like a normal person.

“Yes, James?”

“Be like this forever,” he huffed, thinking the worst was over. He got off his knee and hugged her, falling into her a little.

“You're drunk,” she said.

“On your color!” he said, putting his hand on her face. “I'm drunk on your color because you are the color of pink wine!”

She held him up with her firm shoulder. “You know when I worked at Canary's they'd have us mix the red and the white together if someone ordered blush?” she said.

“Marry me,” James said quietly.

Marge's cheeks sunk.

They searched each other's faces under the lights of the buildings and the shade of the trees and the lights of the stars and the shade of the night.

James grabbed Marge's face with both hands.

“Come on,” he said, desperate now.

Marge let a smile enter her shocked, wide face.

“Marry me!” James yelled, shaking her shoulders. “Come on!”

Marge's eyes welled with tears and she let out another huge throaty laugh. “Are you . . . are you kidding?” she said.

“Do you see me laughing?” he said.

Marge laughed more, and started to cry, too. “You are laughing, James.”

“That's because it's funny! I'm asking you to marry me! Me! Asking you! To marry me! It's absurd! I'm absurd! I'm absurd and you're wonderful! And here I am asking you—”

“Yes,” she interrupted, kissing him with her salty mouth. “I say yes, you weirdo.”

This yes was
a promise. A midnight promise. A middle-of-the-road-at-midnight promise. Another of James's wild sensations, crashing around the New York night, landing in his brain like a wonderful dream. But it was also a different kind of promise. A promise that, because the world had agreed collectively to formally acknowledge such promises, was to society. It was a promise to adulthood, a promise that James was a man, a promise that he would become the man he thought of when he thought of a
husband
: someone capable, reliable, strong-willed, good. Yes, they were young. Yes, James was inexperienced when it came to what he and Marge kept referring to as “real life”—life outside of an academic setting, where more counted than pages written per night or the grade you got on your term paper. Yes, there would be tough times, big fights, months where they didn't have enough money, doubts and fears. But all of this was eclipsed by the
symbolic
yes: things were going to be different when they were married. When they put those rings on each other, they were going to grow up.

After the wedding
—an expensive affair hosted by Marge's family in Connecticut—they moved from their tiny Columbia apartment into a little wooden house in the Village. Marge got a job as an art director at an advertising agency called—absurdly, James thought—
Agency,
having applied solely based on the fact that the job had
art
in its title. She seamlessly fell into a nine-to-five routine, slicking her hair back in new ways, coming home with beautiful groceries, talking about her coworkers with equal parts resentment and enjoyment. James, though, had had a rockier transition into reality. If you didn't count writing articles for the
Spectator
, which hadn't paid, James had never in his life held a job, and by certain definitions was practically unemployable. The jobs he did land that first year were of the odd sort—James was a movie-ticket ripper and a lightbulb screwer-inner and a travel agent's assistant and a typist for a writer of astrology books. None of it worked out, and whether it was because of James's odd mannerisms (wandering mind, poor sense of time and responsibility, constant references to things other people did not know or could not see) or his own boredom (typing did not hold his attention), he could not say. He understood that he was intelligent, but it was an odd sort of intelligence that others could not quite see, and he could not seem to figure out how that translated to a job, a real job in the real world.

But simultaneously, he was discovering a whole new world, the world of downtown New York, which had only one requirement for acceptance:
interest.
And James had that in spades. Immediately upon moving to the Village, by sheer proximity to so much art—its makers and its dealers and its lovers—James's mind erupted with a cacophony of ideas, colors, sensations, and images. He could hardly control himself: he wanted to taste the art, to feel it, to hold it, to
have it.
The right sculpture could still give him a hard-on (occasionally trips to the Met got embarrassing) and he continued to discover colors that were actually
new,
that he had
never seen before.

“It was like a bruised peach,” he'd try to explain to Marge, whose infatuation with his mental metaphors was waning very slightly, a fact that he did not care to admit to himself. “But if you mixed some honey in.”

He stalked galleries in the daytime when no one else was there, standing for long stretches in front of pieces that made him hear beautiful music. He took photographs of the pieces and made them into slides that he could flip through in his study at night, keeping them in big brown leather binders, organized in an associative language that only James could understand. (
LIGHT
, read the spine of one binder.
LIGHT BLUE
, read another.) And though he was not big on crowds or schmoozing or hand shaking—in fact he was awkward and claustrophobic, often saying the exact wrong thing to the exact wrong person—he went to an opening almost every night; he simply could not get enough of what they opened for him.

Every kind of everything was going on downtown in those years, and he'd see any of it, whether it was at the pristine Midtown museums or the shitty new spaces in SoHo. Cindy Sherman's slick, sick realism; Robert Barry's conceptual, whimsical way with words; Jenny Holzer's very true Truisms (“
A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS
”; “
AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND
”; “
A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS
”), which were not displayed in a gallery but around the city on white broadsheets, exposing the city to its injustices and realities, to its face.

James loved it all: art as object and art as action, stiff irony and loving expressionism, nonsensical tape recordings and super-self-conscious poetry performances; he loved the appropriators and the activists and everyone in between. Still, though, the largest part of his heart belonged to the painters. Paintings, though the stodgiest and definitely the flattest form, always gave James the most pleasure. He could do cerebral for only so long before he gravitated back toward the paintings, in whose faces he could see the most real passion. It seemed honest in a way that no other form, not even photography, did. It was closest, James thought, to his own practice: an individual's perception of the universe, a map of a mind. When James read about a painting show in the
Times
, he often got to the gallery before the doors opened, stayed until they closed. For the hours in between he let the two-dimensional works turn on the many dimensions of his brain.

When he looked at art or wrote about it, it was as if James's brain were on fire: suddenly the entire universe seemed available and clear. He saw giant perspectives and tiny details. He felt gushes of wind and crawling ants, tasted burnt sugar and gazed at skies' worth of stars. He forgot about all the parts of life that were not worthy of his thoughts: dirty laundry and dirty bathrooms, small favors for Marge and small talk with colleagues, phone calls to his mother and phone bills due last month. Everything disappeared except what mattered: the potent, powerful stuff of life, the heart explosions, the color, the
truth.

In his notebook, he jotted down the sensations he felt while looking at the work, no matter how nonsensical they might seem—
Louise Fishman=strong smell of shampoo; Bill Rice=nocturnal mood, headache.
When he got back to the house, with Marge already asleep, he would view the slides and type down his notes on his typewriter—version after version until it made some sort of sense as an art review. Every Friday he would seal one of the pieces into a manila envelope and walk it over to the New York Times building, where he dropped it in the arts editor's mailbox. Upon releasing the envelope he always felt the same combination of convictions: that the editor would never read it and it would never see the light of day, and that it was bound to be read by someone, and that when that someone did read it, it would captivate them so completely they could not deny its publication.

“I honestly can't understand if what I'm writing is good or total shit,” he told Marge. “Which is ironic, isn't it, considering that I'm trying to forge a career out of understanding what is good and what is total shit.”

“It's good,” Marge assured him over and over, though in her voice there was a tinge of
How long can this go on for?
“The best things can take the longest to discover, right? Don't they?”

“Let's just hope this isn't a Van Gogh situation,” James said. “Let's just hope I'm not dead before I can afford to be alive.”

Finally, after five years of odd jobs and rejections, James got a call from Seth, the
New York Times
arts editor's squeaky assistant, who told him his article on the painter Mary Heilmann—whose Crayola-colored works made “this reviewer's heart feel like it was drinking water”—was going to print tomorrow.

“Without any edits?”

“There were no edits necessary, Mr. Bennett,” squeaked the assistant. “The editor said it was fresh.”

James had hung up the phone and jumped in the air. Then he sat on the floor. Then he leaped up again and ran outside, looked up and down the street, realized he had gone out there for no reason at all and turned back around to go inside, and sat down at his desk to smile until he couldn't anymore because his face hurt.

He and Marge celebrated by going out to dinner at a medium-expensive place that had been recommended by “everyone”—meaning everyone at the Agency office, the sort of crowd that knew what frisée was, how to pronounce
haricot vert—
where Marge paid. Then they had sex twice.

“You proud of me?” he said as they lay in bed.

“Extremely,” she said, nuzzling her face into his chest.

And that was enough for him. He could have died that day and had no regrets, with Marge's
extremely
lingering in his ear.

After the article ran, James received a check in the mail and alongside it a medium-size package. The check was for a thousand dollars and the package was a Mary Heilmann painting, one of the pink-and-black ones, with a note from Heilmann herself, reading,
So your heart will never be thirsty. XO, MH.
James spent the thousand immediately, on a drawing by the artist and poet Joe Brainard that he had seen at a makeshift gallery in the East Village the week before—a sketch of a box of cigarettes, which made James's eyes haze over with a moony, adventurous blue. He hung the two pieces next to each other in his study—small emblems of his small success, reminding him daily that there was beauty in the world, and that he could feel that beauty in his body, and that he could put that beauty onto a page for others to experience. This was how he was meant to engage with society, he thought: from the little ship of his study, through the magnificent portal of the
New York
fucking
Times
.

Over the next years, as the seventies wore on and James and Marge pushed into their late twenties and then, as if it happened overnight, their
thirties
, people began to notice the articles, and respond to them. They called it a sixth sense—James's surreal ability to pick out the exact thing that made a work of art good or not, and in extrapolation the ability to hone in on that goodness from far away: years in advance or across a crowded room. James would look at a sculpture and find the exact arc where it became interesting (the arc that felt like an airport and blinked a whitish gray), the precise point on the map of a painting to stick his figurative pin, the mark that made the whole thing worth making at all. He wrote everything he saw behind his eyes when he looked at art—
Brice Marden preoccupies me like a shoe that has stepped in gum
, or
Schnabel, not to be funny, has too many plates in the air
—and people told him it was genius, that he was changing the very nature of art critique, that they wanted to take him out for a drink sometime, pick his brain, get his opinion on the new Sol LeWitt.

All of this led to a sort of trust: the readers trusted him to tell them whether they should spend their Saturday at a show; the artists trusted him to write about them with intelligence and fairness—even if the reviews weren't always positive, they always reflected something important and intrinsic to the work.

“I appreciate you, you know that?” a painter named Audrey Flack told James at a gallery after-party. James, the week before, had written that Audrey's hyperrealistic painting of a handful of wrapped candy was
as stale as those sorts of candies get: the kinds that have been sitting too long in a grandmother's foyer.
James had been avoiding Audrey, but here she was, being nice.